Various Artists

Purple Snow: Forecasting the Minneapolis Sound

Numero Group; 2013

Find it at:

Regional funk and R&B compilations have been flooding the reissue market for ages now, and yet in all that time, it's taken until this year for even the deepest-digging reissue label in the business to get to the foundation of one of the most vital scenes in funk lore. The chart-topping, synth-heavy pulse that came out of the Twin Cities in the 80s still seems, even to most music fans short of the local veteran scenester, to be an abrupt fluke of auteurist proficiency and creativity, largely credited to the braintrusts of everything-man superstar Prince and the songwriting/production juggernaut of Jimmy Jam Harris and Terry Lewis. The groups these three names cut their chops with have been hinted at by music historians, and the peers they shared a scene with got some acknowledgment here and there. But little of this information has ever really been put into the wider context of what Minneapolis sounded like before the Minneapolis Sound. How could the scene that gave us 1999 and Control have such an underknown history where its pre-eighties R&B roots are concerned?

Thanks to the deep knowledge base and research that went into Numero Group's Purple Snow compilation, it's made clear just why that is—and why, in a fairer world, it shouldn't have been the case. A large metro area split between the rival identies of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the Twin Cities had plenty of pitfalls for touring bands. It's a long drive to just about everywhere—more than 300 miles to Milwaukee, 400 to Chicago, and 700 to Cincinnati. Staying home, meanwhile, meant a relatively small support group to break bands on a wider scale before they had the buzz to go national. Booking for funk and R&B bands was constrained to a small circuit of clubs, including venues like the Nacirema and the Cozy Bar, that had vanished by the time First Avenue served as the setting for Purple Rain. There weren't any nationally-distributed, Minneapolis-based indie labels that supported the sound on the level of the garage-pop powerhouse of Soma in the 60s or the punk/new wave stronghold of Twin/Tone in the 80s. What few radio stations supported the format were low-wattage and under-the-radar, while the local press was more fixated on finding the next breakthrough folkie to emerge from the campus coffeehouse circuit like Bob Dylan a decade before.

By now, that one Chris Rock joke might be coming to mind—that the only two black people in Minnesota are Prince and (the now late) Kirby Puckett. Which is hyperbole, of course, but not by much. Despite the presence of strong black communities in both Minneapolis and Saint Paul dating back generations, there was still enough of a widespread passive-aggressive animosity from forces outside the community that manifested as a cold shoulder to deeper integration. In 1978, the same year Prince released his debut album For You, Twins owner Calvin Griffith was caught stating that the reason he picked Minnesota as the destination city for the Washington Senators' 1961 relocation was because “we found out you only had 15,000 blacks here.” The music scene wasn't much easier—more than one musician in the liner notes to Purple Snow mentions that groups couldn't get booked unless there were at least a few white faces in the band. Between prejudice, lack of resources, and a geographically isolated and constrained locale, there was only one way a funk scene could thrive in the Twin Cities: people had to stick together and network, even as limited resources meant stiff competition.

For the better part of the 70s, that meant a lot of woodshedding, experimentation, personnel crossover, community outreach, and evolution—but not a signature style. Most of the material on Purple Snow that dates from the early-mid 70s pre-synthesized, pre-disco funk era could come from just about anywhere, so long as that anywhere had a bunch of talented kids who dug Curtis Mayfield and Isaac Hayes. Many of them typically followed those artists' opulent musicianship, albeit with tighter budgets and dimmer spotlights. Haze, a St. Paul band who predated Prince by having some Purple in their identity until they figured the Hendrix estate wouldn't approve, recorded an excellent debut album in 1974. Two cuts from that self-titled LP—the minor-hit ballad “I Do Love My Lady” and the uptempo conga funk of “Waiting for the Moment”—emphasize the close harmonies, purring organ, and swirling, liquid wah-wah guitars that play up their psychedelic-soul bonafides. Prophets of Peace, who did everything they could to land gigs but saw their ambitions thwarted by the Cities' constraints, were a big horn-driven unit in the tradition of War or Mandrill; what the selection “Get On” lacks in deep messaging (“hey everybody, we wanna party/ all night long”) it makes up for in the kind of crowdpleasing tightness and groove that heated every undersized dancefloor it was pointed at.

And then there's the Family—not to be confused with the mid-80s Prince offshoot of the same name that recorded “Nothing Compares 2 U” five years before Sinead did. A tight-knit crew of musicians who changed their name from Black Magic after some interloping Chicagoans (and, more damagingly, the media) mistook their community center homebase for a turf-war locale, the Family—here billed as Music, Love & Funk—contribute a sweaty yet sophisticated Ohio Players-caliber seven-plus-minute jam called “Stone Lover”, recorded in 1976. By then, Spike Moss and the neighborhood resource that was The Way community center had become a nexus for North Minneapolis youth to hone their playing, and the opportunity to record at the legendary Sound 80 studios of Blood on the Tracks fame drew in a grip of local musicians to join the chorus.

One of the voices to jump in on that cut was one Prince Nelson, then a teenager on the verge of dropping his last name as he got his session-rat studies in at Chris Moon's busy Moonsound Studios. And if there's one thing that Purple Snow makes clear, it's that Prince was practically everywhere in the scene during the late 70s, a prodigial player who learned from everybody and subsequently lent his credits to groups like the Lewis Connection (background vocals and guitar on the silky slow jam “Got to Be Something Here”) and 94 East (the pool-party smoothness of “If You See Me", where his taut chicken-scratch lead guitar riff barely reveals the virtuoso lurking beneath the hired-hand pro). It's a bit odd to hear him primarily in the context of just another piece of a bigger puzzle, even if his burgeoning talent is attested to frequently in the album's liner notes. (A Minnesota Daily quote, inspired by observations of him at work at Moonsound: “He's got his program pretty well worked out and the wheels are in motion... it's only a matter of time.”) But it goes a long way towards explaining just how and why he managed to dominate the Minneapolis scene: not merely with outrageous style, crossover aspirations, or courting controversy, but by working his ass off.

The only artists to rival Prince's proficiency at the time were, of course, Jimmy Harris and Terry Lewis. As inseparable as their identities have become, Purple Snow makes a point of outlining how divergent their parallel paths really were before they joined forces at the turn of the 80s. Harris put drumming first—he did gigs with his father, “Cornbread” Harris, in a jazz trio before he hit his teens. Then he auditioned for a band at age 13 and found himself outclassed behind the kit, so he joined as a keyboard player instead and cut his teeth on an electric piano borrowed from his dad. By high school, Harris' ear for Philly soul and knack for songwriting led him to become the keyboardist, writer and arranger for a group called Mind & Matter. That band's material here is commercial-friendly to a point—Lewis's Gamble/Huff nods are savvy, and catchy as all get-out—but with the circa-1977 equipment at his fingertips, Lewis' budget-minded substitution of synthesizers for string sections is a bit prescient. Sadly, not prescient enough to find an audience—though they more than held their own in warmup gigs for disco-soul bands like Pleasure and Brass Construction.

Terry Lewis was clued in to Harris's talent, but wasn't able to recruit him into the own thing he had going for a while: a Funkadelic-inspired band intially known as Wars of Armageddon before they changed their name to the less-apocalyptic, Donald Byrd-inspired Flyte Tyme. (The photo of this band in full Mothership-stowaway regalia is worth the price of the collection alone.) Flyte Tyme were more defiantly funky than some of the smooth-soul bands they shared the city with, and powerhouse enough to reportedly upstage Prince when he played his first hometown headlining gig at Minneapolis' Capri Theater in February 1979. In the songs included here from a 1979 Flyte Tyme session—“It's the Things That You Do” and “I've Got You on My Mind”—there's a polished yet gutsy momentum that pairs slap bass and synthesizers to evocative (and scene-definingly familiar) effect. Fatefully, one of the band's most crucial components at the time was singer Cynthia Johnson, who boasted the kind of outer-space glamour and Chaka Khan chops that could've made Flyte Tyme huge. But in jumping ship from Flyte Tyme to record the vocals for Lipps. Inc's “Funkytown”—one of the first hits for the Minneapolis Sound and one of the last of the disco era—another identity change for the band was necessary. As fate would have it, Harris's gig with Mind & Matter wasn't panning out, and the side work he was getting in the studio— including playing all the synthesized instruments and drums on Michael A. Dixon & J.O.Y.'s 1980 electro-gospel curiosity “You're All I Need”—wasn't enough. So the man his DJ gig christened Jimmy Jam became Flyte Tyme's second keyboardist. The Flyte was eventually grounded, leaving them as the Time.

With those enduring luminaries at work, it's still worth acknowledging some of the groups that either fell through the cracks or found minor stardom on a modest scale. While the Minneapolis sound comes across on the surface like an e pluribus unum nucleus where everyone eventually benefited from the stratospheric rise of a few, the expectations and associations of being in with Prince and company could wear an artist down. Some defied it, like the velvety quiet storm stylings of Rockie Robbins (“Together”) or the straightforward disco-flavored groove of Band of Thieves veteran guitarist Orville Shannon (“One Life to Live”). Others were drawn into the inner circle, only to be steered towards something they didn't quite fit, like Sue Ann Carwell, a self-proclaimed “little ghetto chick just hanging around town” whose tenuous Prince connections led to a Warner Bros. contract. Her self-titled 1981 debut, produced by Pete Bellotte in a half-assed compromise between Minneapolis and Italo-disco, bricked big-time, while a truer-to-the-style 1982 track, “Should I Or Should I Not", was shopped around A&Rs to no avail. And while the early works of the more familiar names here are intriguing, there's the feeling that they should've led to more than just famous affiliations. Alexander O'Neal, the charismatic, rangy-voiced post-Johnson frontman for Flyte Tyme until Morris Day replaced him, would notch a string of hits that early indie cuts like the squiggly get-down jams “Borrowed Time” and “Do You Dare” promisingly anticipated while proving that his success as a performer wasn't entirely dependent on Jam/Lewis. And Andre Cymone's minimalist, funky synthpop/new wave concoction “Somebody Said” makes it worth noting that his career encompassed far more than being one of Prince's longest cohorts and playing bass for the Revolution, even if that's how his mid-80s solo albums were pigeonholed.

Then again, few shadows were harder to escape than the one of Minnesota itself. Longtime residents and scenesters might flip through the booklet of Purple Snow and note the way these artists positioned themselves among local landmarks—Prophets of Peace lined up among the lavish foliage of the Como Park Conservatory; 94 East lounging in the shadows of Charles Ginnever's jagged modernist sculpture 'Nautilus' outside the Walker Art Center; Mind & Matter raising disco fingers to the sky perched atop the mushroom-like brutalist platforms of Peavey Plaza. The musicians position themselves like they're unusual presences in these Twin Cities landmarks, even though they're established local artists. Maybe they felt out of place, crowded out, even unwelcome. And whether the emergence of the Minneapolis Sound in the 80s changed all that is still somewhat uncertain; alt-country and bluegrass acts currently overwhelm up-and-coming R&B and hip-hop artists in sheer number and opportunity. But the precedent that Purple Snow traces led to something special: a situation where a core of artists were given an inch and wound up taking a mile—not out of greed, but of necessity.